ABSTRACT
The history of professional education can be seen as the story of successive stages of confidence in, and disavowal of, intellectual knowledge. Influenced by events such as the GI Bill supporting higher education, the mission-oriented science of World War II, and the experience with operations research and management science, professionals in business, law, and planning, as well as the clergy, have sometimes embraced and at other times rejected attempts at intellectualization. That history is too well-known to merit repeating. What is significant, however, is how the intellectualization of the professions has ushered in the professionalization of the academy. Once the bastions of the liberal arts, intellectual fields like epistemology and moral philosophy are reaching out into public policy. Philosophers and social scientists, once shy of less enlightened minds, now increasingly venture into the public domain, and fields like economics and sociology experiment with more professional curricula.
